The Despicable Nancy Grace

By Ben Cohen: In perhaps one of the most unsettling stories of the year, a 29 year old mother and her baby died within months of each other in circumstances that can only be described as tragic. Toni Medrano accidentally smothered her newborn son last November after drinking a bottle of vodka and passing out next to the baby on the sofa. Medrano then died last Saturday night of injuries from injuries sustained earlier in the week when she doused herself in a flammable liquid and set herself alight.

CNN’s Nancy Grace, the ambulance chasing moralizer who makes a living of off other people’s misery not only devoted hours of pornographic programming covering the case, but arguably actively participated in provoking the young mother to suicide. From Raw Story:

Medrano was charged with two counts of manslaughter last month in Washington County court.

It was shortly after the sentencing that Nancy Grace produced a segment about Medrano for her Headline News Network show, “Nancy Grace.”

“Why no ‘murder one?’” she demanded, outraged at the lighter manslaughter charges. She then cracked open a bottle of cheap vodka and started pouring drinks in an effort to show how many drinks Medrano downed the night her baby died, insisting that a mother who showed such reckless disregard for her child’s safety should be hit with a charge of first-degree murder. It was during the segment that Grace coined the term “Vodka Mom” for Medrano.

Medrano’s mother, Yvonne Hill told Fox 9 that her daughter was trying to move on when the segment aired, than in the months since the death of Adrian Medrano, Toni had been trying to “build and move on,” but when she saw the segment, “it broke her spirit in the worst way.”

You can watch Grace’s disgusting segment below (and it’s not for the faint of heart):

Firstly, anyone who downs an entire bottle of vodka has a very serious alcohol problem, no doubt stemming from severe mental health issues. While Medrano may have been criminally culpable for the death of her infant, she would have benefited more from serious psychological counseling than a jail sentence and the wrath of narcissistic blowhards like Nancy Grace. Anyone who accidentally kills their own child must go through unimaginable guilt and self hatred and should be completely off limits to the media. I do understand the need for legal process, after all, a child was killed, but it was so horrific a case that I can see no reason to punish the mother further. Grace makes a living exploiting cases like this with absolutely no regard for the damage she causes. This isn’t the first time she has been involved in spurring on a suicide either – back in 2006 the pseudo legal expert was involved in another case where a young mother killed herself soon after incurring the histrionic wrath from the ratings obsessed presenter. Writes Chez Pazienza of the case:

Grace — in a near-sociopathic display of morbid prurience and sadistic exploitation — berated Florida mother Melinda Duckett on-air to the point where it may have led her to kill herself, then ran the pre-taped interview immediately following the suicide. (That the lawsuit blaming Grace for Duckett’s death was dismissed is immaterial; what she did was still unethical as hell.)

Duckett shot herself in the head rather than continue to face such vicious scrutiny, her parents stating that their daughter had taken her life in part because of Grace’s savaging.

Grace has never shown remorse for breaking a clearly mentally unwell woman, and has continued to ply her trade as an accusation hurling mega mouth. It is an outrage that CNN continues to hire her and the organization is sullying its name by associating with her. Grace is not criminally culpable for the death of Duckett or Medrano, but it is clear that her cruel hectoring created an environment that aided the tragic outcomes in both cases.

Nancy Grace doesn’t care about the lives she wrecks – she cares about her career and will do anything to stay in the limelight. While she may feign regret that Duckett and Medrano took their own lives, really, she bathes in the attention the cases bring her. As Chez writes:

In her [Grace’s] mind she is the only real arbiter of right, wrong and legality and therefore it’s within her God-given right to sit in judgment of each and every court case she calculatingly milks of every last drop of soap-opera tawdriness in the name of keeping herself relevant.

Controversy sells, and Grace clearly doesn’t care whether she’s personally involved or not. The more extreme the case the better, and if Grace has to break a few eggs to boost her ratings, then so be it.